


With the Flow

by Jodie



Category: due South
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-14
Updated: 2010-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:26:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jodie/pseuds/Jodie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a recapitulation of the Benny/Ray relationship with a happy/sappy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With the Flow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sam_gangee](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=sam_gangee).



The year two thousand ten had been an important one for Benton Fraser and Ray Vecchio. It was the year when Benny and Ray finally confessed their mistakes to each other and began to put them right. They told each other difficult truths, and settled old resentments. Tears flowed in streams as they exposed long hoarded secrets.  They revealed the selves that they had been when they parted after Ray's undercover assignment ended back in nineteen ninety nine, and saw clearly the men that they had become in the years since. 

Ray's Las Vegas assignment had been a disaster for both of them.  Fraser confessed that he had disliked the man who looked out of Ray's eyes when he returned.  He left Ray's hospital room aware of feeling powerful guilt over Ray's self-sacrifice on his behalf, but also relief at fleeing the hardness in his former partner.  He went home to the far north seeking the solace of the familiar and the comforting numbness of the frigid temperatures. Ray told of struggling with jealously and abandonment in addition to his physical challanges.  Unable to join in the chase after Muldoon or the following quest for the Hand of Franklin due to his gun shot injury, he fled south to the warmth of Florida and a second marriage as a remedy. Neither man had been successful.  For the first few years they merely exchanged birthday cards, and then tentatively casual notes.  A trickle of letters came north with news of divorce and business failure, and some came south with tales of frequent posting changes and the sadness of Diefenbaker's death.  The emotions they experienced at their individual losses turned the trickle into a torrent.  The letters led to telephone calls, and then to a face to face reunion.   

How strange to have come so far from where they started. Sometimes, when they stood in front of the mirror while shaving, they would be startled by the faces looking back. When they met in nineteen ninety three, Ray had a full (well, almost full...perhaps slightly thinning) head of black hair, and smooth cheeks. Now he had sparse gray stubble and hollows on his face that told of hardships and sorrows and pain. He moved slowly, occasionally having to stop and catch his breath. When Benny first came to Chicago after his father's murder, he looked like a cadet even though he was already a veteran of thirteen years in the RCMP. Now his alert blue eyes looked out from a nest of wind burnt wrinkles, and his pelt of dark hair was salted with white at the temples.  Although strong, his movements now showed the stiffness from the bullet wound in his back and the repeated damage to his leg.  Both attractive men, they nonetheless were marked by the turmoil of the preceding years. 

 

..............................................................................................

Whenever Ray Vecchio reflected on his past (and he grew more reflective the older he got), he couldn't help but marvel at the way the flow of his life shifted when Benton Fraser entered it. It was like the dam that brought Benny to him. The water flowed one way for ages, but then somebody decided to put something new in the way and drowned the caribou...and started a whole crazy chain of events. Benny put himself right in Ray's way, and you couldn't move him once he decided on something. You had to get used to the crazy changes Benny brought with him and learn to accommodate yourself to them. Ray's relationships with women (and he did love women) just washed away with the flood that was Benny. His city, his work, his habits...they rushed by like pouring water. Benny was a rock they flowed around.  His Florida years had seemed strangely empty without the deluge of drama that always had come with Benny around.  He longed for something he never thought he would miss.  He finally stopped struggling against the tide of loneliness, and sought what he needed. 

 

..............................................................................................

Benton Fraser had always been a reflective sort of fellow. Like his father before him, he took the opportunity to assess each day before he fell asleep. He took time to weigh his decisions and decide on a course of action to take when he would wake in the morning. In his middle age, though, he found that he spent more time examining the whole stream of his life rather than each day. That stream, as he recalled it, carried him through the loss of his mother when he was six. It ran through the peripatetic life he shared with his traveling librarian grandparents. The stream rolled through his decision to follow his father into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and his time at Depot. From his first posting right up to his father's murder, the stream swept him along--and then took a strange turn, to Chicago, and a meeting with an individual unlike any he had met before.  Ray kept him afloat in the wild rapids of the city.  When faced with the reality of a different Ray, a confused and lonely Benny had grasped at his new friend like a drowning man to a piece of flotsam.  His intelligence told him that it was time to stop clinging, and find his way back to solid ground.

 

................................................................................................

It was a glorious day at Niagara Falls.  Seventeen years had rushed past like water over the cliff, and here they were.  They were only just getting started. Benton Fraser and Ray Vecchio stood on the deck of the Maid of the Mist, not caring that they were getting soaked with the spray. They were finally right where they wanted to be. In the waters separating their two countries, they stood with their hands linked, intent on each other in the midst of a crowd of tourists. There, with Canada and the U.S. as their witnesses, they whispered to each other with words of devotion.  Tiny drops of water suspended in the air caught the light, acting as prisms. A rainbow glowed above them as they stood together.  For the moment, there were no mishaps, misadventures, or miscreants demanding their attention.  They vowed to make their bond with one another their priority for the remainder of their years.

 

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to Springwoof for the helpful beta comments on my first draft.


End file.
